Mero Moment: What does ‘gun control’ even mean?

OPINION — America is home to approximately 300 million firearms. One study suggests that 78 percent of Americans do not own a gun; 19 percent of Americans own half of all firearms; and, three percent of Americans own the other half.

The Vegas shooter was in possession of 42 guns, bringing 23 of them to the hotel with him. Understand there is no correlation between owning a lot of guns and being a mass murderer, even if mass murderers sometimes own a lot of guns.

In fact, it seems there is no way to predict when a gun owner will pack up a bunch of guns, book a hotel room overlooking an outdoor mass celebration, break out the windows of the hotel room and start firing away on a crowd of innocent people.

So, if we cannot reasonably predict who will misuse a firearm, what is the purpose of gun control? Obviously, the purpose cannot be to stop a person from randomly killing a bunch of random people.

Perhaps it is justified to reduce the odds of a random shooter killing random people? But what mathematical equation do we use to reduce the odds without getting rid of guns altogether? And is that mathematical equation based on some general theory of gun control? Let me save you some trouble, no, no and no.

Gun control advocates may be well intended but their logic is juvenile and their suggested remedies half-baked. For so many advocates, the solution is complete confiscation of guns. They often argue that confiscation is not their goal but, fact is, that’s what they believe if they believe that confiscating one gun from an otherwise law-abiding citizen makes a difference.

If one confiscation makes a difference, complete confiscation must solve the problem. That is the logic behind gun control.

Regular people know instinctively that this thinking is flawed. Whether you like the bumper sticker or not, guns do not kill people, people kill people. A gun is an inanimate object. It only becomes animated when used by a human being. This is why gun ownership rises to the level of a right in a nation founded upon three pillars of the Second Amendment: A personal sense of wellbeing, private property and a healthy distrust of government.

Here is the dilemma: A gun represents exponentially more safety throughout society than it does death. For every Vegas shooter there are millions of other Americans for whom guns do not equal death.

Let’s flip the script to really flesh out the meaning of gun control. Why do we have gun regulations at all? If the misuse of a firearm is due to mental illness, the opposite of mental wellbeing, why control guns at all? Why not just control the use of guns by mentally ill people? Again, if people kill people, why not regulate people? In this case, you cannot buy a gun if you are mentally ill just the same as you cannot drive a car if you suffer from dementia.

In the latter example, we’re not going to ban cars, we would be regulating the people looking to use them.

If that is what gun control means, every rational person is in favor of gun control. And, if not, those otherwise rational people must be irrational on this point for other reasons, such as partisan politics or rigid ideology. The National Rifle Association (NRA) does not need to spend a nickel to defend gun ownership. The NRA needs to spend money to help rational people understand why irrational people should or should not be allowed to own guns.

Mentally ill people have rights but owning a gun is not one of them. So President Trump’s action to lift the ban from gun ownership by mentally ill people does not make any sense. Nor does the NRA’s defense of the order.

The NRA needs to help the rest of us understand where we can properly draw the line for gun ownership. The Second Amendment is safe in the hands of reasonable people. That is not the issue. The real debate is over what regulations make sense.

It just announced its support for prohibitions on “bump stocks” that turn guns into automatic weapons. Good for them, but why? Why is that restriction okay but others are not? That is the real debate for gun advocates. And conservatives cannot be afraid of that debate. It’s an honest debate.

If gun control means general confiscation or repealing the Second Amendment, most Americans do not believe in gun control. But if gun control really means “people control,” specifically crazy people control, most Americans would agree. I would agree.

I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.

Paul Mero is an opinion columnist for St. George News. The opinions stated in this article are his own and may not be representative of St. George News.

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About the Author

Paul Mero's "Mero Moment" can be heard every Thursday on KVNU's "For the People" program on 610 AM/102.1 FM between 4-6 p.m. Mero is a prominent conservative leader and President/CEO of Next Generation Freedom Fund. He can be reached at paul.mero@nextgenfreedomfund.org.
The opinions stated in this column are Mero's own and may not represent the views of St. George News.

30 Comments

We could outlaw all guns and people would still get them on the black market. That’s what criminals do. This guy didn’t have a criminal background and could pass the background checks. What does that say? Idk, maybe, you never know when someone will snap. You never know what is truly in the heart of a person.

I don’t own a gun and I probably never will. If it’s my time to go, it’s my time. But in tragedy, I’m standing by the people that have a concealed weapon and shoot the suspect.

“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

Exactly! It is impossible to do a psychological profile on everyone in the US. Prohibition on guns won’t work any more than it did on liquor. Many guns are unregistered so there is no way to track them. And you can’t confiscate private property without just cause. People paid for their guns and the government has no right to steal them from law-abiding citizens just because one person out of millions might act out.

There is no confiscation bill in Congress. Old gund manufactured before laws are grandfathered in. There are liberals who want mandatory buy backs like Australia had but they have never seen mainstream support enough to make it beyond rhetoric. Mero’s use of that notion was problematic and a bad faith addition to otherwise bland post.

This comes off a critique on the semantics of the politics of gun laws, which is well earned. Making any debate binary plays into irrational dialogue. We know even the term “mass shooting” has become so politicized as to be almost useless and the definition so broad as to be ineffective at discussing what most of us know it to be.

If its about actual regulation, than I think Mero is being overly simplistic. And, projecting an assumed desire for confiscation onto a group that doesn’t vocalize such policy is not civil, good faith dialog. Its never been about wether “guns kill people” or ” people kill people” but the fact that people with guns can kill people more effeciently. For more than a century our country has accepted that the 2nd Amendment is not unlimited in scope and that we can regulate gun manufacturing and access. That was clear even with conservative justices in the Heller decision. Just because extreme rhetoric on both sides has caused a stalemate doesn’t mean there aren’t legislative and policy means to mitigate the scale and context of our current epidemic.

But we need to get past talking point rhetoric and our government needs to be able to collect real data, which is currently prohibited.

Gun Control is perfect for liberals. Like all lib-think, gun control is something which sounds reasonable on the surface but cannot be argued logically when all the facts are on the table.

The problems we are having with mass shootings are actually quite negligible when taken in context. Using 2015 statistics from a liberal source, we find out that 475 people were killed in mass shootings in the USA that year. This number is utterly insignificant when compared to heart disease at 614,348, cancer at 591,699, suicide at 42,773, or good old-fashioned automobile accidents at 136,503. In fact, mass shootings miss the Top 20 altogether by a huge margin. Even homicide-general barely cracks that list.

So it’s a problem, but it’s a problem of perception rather than reality. Your chances of choking on food and dying are approximately 6 times greater than the chances you will be killed in a mass shooting. You’re not going to give up lunch, but you are prepared to give up your liberty?

Sometimes repetition of the truth is the enemy of reason and logic. You can’t drive down many streets in the USA without seeing the “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” bumper sticker. This is a profound truth. But it’s become the equivalent of rhetoric via non-stop repetition. Criminals will always have guns. There are 300 million firearms in the USA. If we banned all personal firearms, and stopped manufacturing them immediately, criminals would always have guns for the foreseeable future. The only people who would be disarmed are the people who need protection from this element of society.

The liberals are constantly talking about the kinds of guns we need as well. And me, I’m not one of these people who believes our Constitutional right to bear arms is so that we can defend ourselves from our own government. Even if it became necessary to do so, it is not possible to protect oneself from the advanced weaponry at the government’s disposal. You can horde all the guns you want but that’s not going to help you against a B-1 bomber or an Abrams tank. Guns are to protect us from criminals, who have access to any kind of gun made. To raise questions of whether or not we should be allowed this or that kind of weapon (usually in consideration of its ability to fire in semi-auto or auto mode), in recognition of its relative power vs government weaponry, is ignoring the truth of why we need guns in the first place, and is merely prologue to the real agenda of disarming us completely.

If people really want to explore the reasons behind mass shootings in the USA, it all boils down to mental health and our failure to recognize it or treat it. Life in the USA is a chaotic ride, full of ups and downs, with all the wealth, sex, and debauchery of the world constantly being dangled in front of our faces. The ride itself drives some people insane. If you ask why these shootings occur in the USA more than elsewhere, it’s our win-or-lose culture. There are sore losers, and when the stakes are…everything under the sun…being a sore loser can go beyond merely throwing a temper tantrum. Some people want revenge.

There’s nothing to be done about that. Identifying these people and sorting them out with treatment is currently an impossible task. But that is exactly where our efforts are best spent, because taking guns away from people in a country like this is just crazy talk. We are what we are, there’s no going back, and we must have an armed citizenry or crime will go straight out of control.

Funny that no one mentions that the guy was a crazy hateful liberal, good thing that he wasn’t a conservative, then it would be all over the liberal news media (ABC, CBS, CNN, etc..). Anyone that wants to kill a mass amount of people can get or make the means to do so (vehicle, explosives, etc..). A killer will always find ways to be so.

Do you have a reliable source for your claim about his politics? Every interview has mentioned him as a boring, even keeled guy before this and I haven’t heard a whisper about his politics from family or friends.

I could go on for some time about the importance of leaving the 2nd Amendment alone and NOT infringing on my right to bear arms.
But what concerns me the most is the “what if” they were successful in a gun ban and full confiscation. If that happened, within weeks or months the 1st and 4th Amendment would be history too.
Don’t kid yourself. With lightning speed those other rights and freedoms would be gone and many others would follow.

Keeping the 2nd amendment in place is of the utmost importance to our basic rights and freedoms. If it goes, all the others are gone too because how would we fight that ?
Something to think about.

I keep coming back to Sandy Hook where 20 first graders were killed by an semi-automatic military-styled weapon and we did absolutely nothing. Do you think so many would have died if the shooter was just armed with a handgun or regular rifle like I grew up shooting? Do you think that one little boy would have been shot 11 times with a handgun or regular rifle before someone could stop the shooter? The six-year-old’s parents had an open casket in which they had to place a handkerchief over his jaw because he didn’t not have one. His mother wanted to place a small stone in each hand but he had no left arm. Think about him and then tell me that there is nothing that can be done to at least stop making and selling even more powerful military-style weapons with larger and larger magazines. That is gun control that makes sense.

I understand the spirit of your post and I think many of us are dumbfounded by the decades long stalemate around gun regulation.

I will say a few things:

1). The conversation around mental health and gun ownership involves existing federal laws that rely in voluntary submission of medical records at the State level. It would not have prevented this or Sandy Hook for that matter. That said, the federal law already provides means to deny gun purchases to those who have been involuntarily committed. There are also ways to remove that prohibition individually to those who can prove they have healed. Moving to require states to provide records of involuntary commitment would likely help reduce some of the attacks and have a major effect on gun use in suicides (another bewildering statistic).

2) I am not sure how the increased regulation of bump stocks is a red herring. They increase the rate of fire to comparable levels of an automatic weapon, which have long been banned. They increase the effeciency of killing civilians, especially in crowds like we saw in Vegas, even if accuracy is lost. Abandoning that middle ground, ie specific ban on that device, doesn’t seem healthy if we care about reducing the number of casualties in mass shootings.

3) How do you propose banning “military style” weapons given its an overly broad category. Legally an assault weapon from the previous federal ban was any semi-automatic weapon outfitted with two or more components the government deemed too dangerous, ie bayonet mount, foldable butt stock, etc. Semi-automatic weapons have been aroun a long time and are regularly used in hunting (duck, upland game, big game, etc). They are the gun of choice for these men who engage in mass shootings but how do we effectively ban these guns given the difficulty in even finding a relevant definition? And to your question about pistols, yes, an individual can kill a dozen or more people with just a shotgun and pistol. I don’t have a dog in the AR fight as I hate them and the odd culture that surrounds them.(never been impressed with folks using them at public ranges) but evidence from the previous ban was it had absolutely no effect.

4) They have actually shown how quick a trained shooter can even change clips on a pistol in a way that makes extended clips rather useless. I believe the federal government should ban the larger clips sizes (say anything above standard Marine issue size) but I am not convinced that will have a meaningful impact on folks like Paddock who spend a decade or more practicing with his guns but might reduce the killing capacity of inexperienced gunmen in other mass shootings.

I don’t understand why anyone who is not in law-enforcement or the military needs an automatic weapon. Having said that, you need to talk to the parents of those children who lost their lives in the Oklahoma City bombing at the hands of Timothy McVeigh, or how about all the survivors of 9/11? Banning guns from everyone (even if it was possible) isn’t the answer.

Protip: Sandy Hook never happened. I mean, something happened that day but it certainly wasn’t a massacre of schoolchildren.

When you accept that – which you must if you actually take the time to look at the evidence – then the picture starts to clarify a bit. Who are the real bad guys here? The ones who want to stay legally armed to protect themselves and their families from the rampant crime in this country? Or the ones who will go to any lengths up to and including pretending a bunch of children got murdered in order to confiscate your guns?

Here’s the question you should be asking yourself – If an armed intruder shows up at your house armed with a “semi-automatic military-styled weapon,” do you really want to be standing there with a .22 revolver in your hand?

I’ve often wondered why some people seem to have latched onto the conspiracy theory that 20 first-graders were not killed at Sandy Hook. That “something happened” but surely not a massacre. That it was a false flag to take “our” guns, whatever that means. I’m guessing that it is because that atrocity was so beyond comprehension that people could not face the fact that anyone, even someone who is mentally ill, could possibly have committed such a heinous act. That, and the fact that Alex Jones, who makes his living off of conspiracy theories, has promoted that conspiracy theory for years. In fact, your “pro tip” statement is an almost direct quote from Jones. I’ve read that and all the other garbage or “evidence” as you call it.

I’ve followed the aftermath closely over the years, especially of the family of the little boy who was shot 11 times. He had a twin sister who would be 12 by now. His casket was open. The governor and many, many other people saw him the casket. The family has had to move six times to get away from “truthers”. It is disgusting that people can be so cruel.

Oh, and have you heard about the little girl that had lived in Utah before moving to Newtown? According to the “truthers” there she was standing next to President Obama AFTER the memorial for the kids. Oops, I guess the parents made a mistake in having the dead girl show up again. Trouble is that it was her SISTER wearing a similar dress to the one that the dead sister was wearing in an earlier photograph. The list of lies goes on and on. So, yes, I have looked at the “evidence”. The parents of Sandy Hook kids should be treated with compassion rather than the nauseating repetition of the Sandy Hook “truthers” over and over again about their poor, and still, dead children.

To end on a more uplifting note and to continue to debunk the Sandy Hook “truthers”, I offer the following recent story and interview in the Deseret News with the mother of the little girl who I referenced in my last post. Read it and weep or if links aren’t allowed here, just google “What this Utah mom learned about faith, family after her daughter was murdered at Sandy Hook.”

Well Karen & Bike, I am fully a Sandy Hook denier, and anyone who isn’t simply hasn’t done the research.

No photos of dead bodies, no media access to death records, overhead film of actors walking in circles in and out of the firehouse to create the illusion of activity, mothers giving press interviews about their dead children and not crying a single tear, solid computer evidence that the Sandy Hook “story” was written the day before the event, a mysterious perpetrator who may or may not even exist and could not have possibly accomplished the incredible shooting that allegedly killed 26 and wounded 0, a father laughing joyfully before his CNN interview then suddenly adopting a serious face and tone when he realizes he’s on the air, a green-screened Anderson Cooper doing interviews in front of the Newtown City Hall, a children’s photo book from a few years prior to the “event” clearly portraying all of the Sandy Hook “victims,” hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars flowing into the tiny community of Newtown even to this day…and the list goes on.

There’s PLENTY of evidence Sandy Hook was faked, and ZERO evidence that it actually happened. But hey, I get it – for some people, failing to accept the truth as presented by America’s bought-and-paid-for mainstream media means accepting an entirely new reality – the REAL reality – and they just don’t have the stomach for it.

bikeandfishOctober 7, 2017 at 8:07 pm

Never understood the level of paranoia it takes to dive that deep into conspiracy like faking the moon landing, JFK, 9/11 and Sandy Hook denialist. We’ve seen the current American era deemed the post-truth era but this type of irrational and heartless fear mongering has always existed. The NickDangers and Alex Jones just think they are taken more seriously because of the internet.

At least this lunacy is on full display for the world to better understand what we are up against. You are a piece of work.

NickDangerOctober 8, 2017 at 1:57 am

Irrational and heartless fear mongering? Who’s being irrational? ALL the evidence points to a hoax.

Your problem, Bike, is that you simply can’t see anything outside your comfort zone. You can’t see it, because you don’t want to see it. And like all media-educated postmodernists, you attempt to discredit the ugly but real “conspiracies” happening around you by lumping them all into one category.

But they don’t fit comfortably into that category, do they Bike? I mean on the one hand you bring up the moon landing, which I’m pretty sure actually happened. It doesn’t seem that difficult a proposition to me, you get enough boost, get the trajectory right, figure out a way to land when you get there, and boom, you’ve got a moon landing. I mean, it ain’t rocket science.

The JFK assassination has actually been acknowledged by the government as a conspiracy at this point so you’re just…lost, I guess, on that one, or very poorly informed. 9/11, who knows? I know there was a lot of missing airplane wreckage at the Pentagon, and I know that Tower 7 certainly appeared to fall via controlled demolition; I also know the events of 9/11 were used to launch well over a decade of highly-profitable warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the motive is clear. Still, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a “9/11 Truther.”

But Sandy Hook? That one is seriously a no-brainer, Bike. Even aside from the overwhelming mountain of evidence that it was faked, all one needs is even a small understanding of real human nature to realize that those mothers who supposedly lost those children hadn’t lost any actual children. Have you ever seen a mother who has REALLY just lost a child? They cry uncontrollably. They lose their train of thought. They lose the ability to reason or control their emotions. They have a look in their eyes like their lives are truly over. They are utterly inconsolable.

What they most certainly do not do is get in front of a camera the day after it happens and calmly bring up the subject of gun control while scrunching their faces in some ridiculous charade made even more ridiculous by the fact that there are no tears flowing down their cheeks.

You believe what you want, Bike. Sandy Hook is just one more thing to add to the extensive list of subjects you haven’t given enough thought.

bikeandfishOctober 8, 2017 at 11:41 am

I sincerely feel for you, Nick. You fear alot about society and that must be an overwhelming experience. To constantly think the media, government, racial minorities, and homosexuals are conspiring against you can’t be pleasant. Creating a world of alternative facts to align with those fears makes sense under that context. And you have self-admitted shock jocks like Alex Jones stoking those fears to make a buck.

I sure hope you come to a different understanding because the world and actual facts continue to move into the future even if you choose to deny their validity.

I wonder who is the one of us really living in fear? I’m certainly not afraid to confront plain facts and speak my mind about them. But I think what you are afraid of, Bike, is that if you step just slightly outside of the media narrative that frames your world, you will suddenly be confronted by a reality you can’t easily endure.

There are powerful people in this world, Bike – people with more money than you or I can imagine, people with power over our elected officials and our media, people of great intelligence but an evil will, with agendas that reach fruition over decades instead of years. If you don’t understand that, then your condescending debate style, middling thesaurus skills, and above-average grammar are simply wasted on trivialities.

bikeandfishOctober 8, 2017 at 6:48 pm

The concern isn’t fained or just about you. When individual paranoia like you vocalize pollutes public discourse we see devastating consequences. We have seen it with anti-vax rhetoric, climate change deniers, and truthers in major events like Sandy Hook. It feeds off of a lack of media literacy (we saw Trump exploit that to Alex Jones’s delight) and growing distrust of any type of authority/expertise, from scientist to politicians. Creating doubt and distrust in others leaves a vacuum for fear mongers like Trump, Alex Jones and their ilk. The internet takes folks who would normally be stuck on the side of the road alone with cardboard signs and gives them the appearance of authority and trustworthiness.

Its a sad cycle that hurts real people. In this case it gives sociopaths like you the justification to demean and taunt real victims of unspeakable autrocities. And that is obscene.

Like I have said before, I think you know all of this and know how far you have strayed from decency. And its a sincere hope that you find a worldview that is more humane and civil.

I don’t think Nick Danger actually read the article in the Deseret News that had the interview with Emilie Parker’s mother. If he had he would have been amazed at how these “crisis actors” can still keep up the “facade” after all these years. Even giving interviews, joining organizations to help other parents who have lost children through disease or accidents, and starting a charity for the arts in Emilie’s name.

And what about Emilie’s two sisters? Wow they sure are playing their “parts” well right? Here’s an example given by the mom from the interview:
“There are funny fights that the girls remember or “Oh yeah. She had really stinky socks.” Just anything that comes into our minds, we try to acknowledge it and talk about it. It’s made it very normal for us to have her still a part of our family’s day-to-day references. And that has really helped to keep her spirit alive.”

Nick Danger can’t explain away that interview and many, many others as a Sandy Hook “truther” because there is none. The truth is the truth.

Pro tip: Nick Danger, check out Snopes and many other sources for answers. Sure, the Dad was laughing because he was remembering the good times with his child and then the interview started. Haven’t you seen tons of family members relive good moments on tv as they recount tragedies? And, the coroner’s somewhat confusing statement about “it matters how you take the photo”. He was referring to the fact that most (not all) of the parents could only bear to identify their dead children from photos and he took them in certain ways because he wanted to avoid showing them the worst of the injuries. There are pretty simple explanations for all of the truther “facts”.

All of the studies I have read indicate low likelihood of changing the minds of folks like Nick with facts. He continously spouts some of the most inhumane, unsocial and repugnant ideas of anyone in the comment section of this website. Folks who dive into conspiracies like him often are more interested in the comfort of their worldview than facts or compassion for others, especially real victims.

I principally play along with him because of the unfortunate way mistruths spread because of folks like him. “Truthers” and “deniers” thrive in the clogosphere especially if their ideas are taken as remotely plausible.

I agree with you about fact deniers. Thanks for your comments. I mainly interacted with the denier as a tribute to the families of Sandy Hook and their continued pain to let them know that they are not forgotten.

I’ve read or seen most of the interviews with the alleged parents, Karen. They are laughably staged. You’re aware, I hope, that all the “families” are all being well-compensated for their participation in this anti-gun “event?” Maybe you aren’t aware of that, which would explain why you still trust them. Well over $100 million in private donations and $27.5 million in public funds have been distributed among the Sandy Hook “families” so far, via their financial vehicle known as the Sandy Hook Community Foundation, which even hired an executive director on a $100,000+ annual salary, since this is an ongoing process. I.E., the Sandy Hook families are all wealthy for life now. A first in the history of crime.

Fact is, these people are all anti-gun nut-jobs who agreed to stage the event for money. They realized this would mean sticking to the story and giving interviews down the road. And they are indeed sticking to the story – a story which utterly and completely fails to meet any test of reality.

Here’s a thought for you, Karen – why do you suppose there are no photos of the dead children? Every other mass shooting in the history of the planet features photos of the victims. They may not be plastered all over the news in some grotesque manner, but there’s an unspoken deal between the media and the public – if the media says something happened, they back it up with as much photographic evidence as they can get their hands on. If you look for the pictures, you can find them.

So what possible reason could there be to suppress photographs of this particular crime scene? If it did happen, then there ARE photographs; no police agency in the world would just cart the bodies away without fully documenting the crime scene via photography. So why haven’t any of those photos been leaked? It would surely shut up all the “truthers,” who seem to be such an irritant to the alleged victims’ alleged families, and it would really make a fool of Alex Jones and other high-profile celebrities who aren’t afraid to say it never happened. One photo of the supposed 26 dead children would settle the question once and for all. So why wouldn’t those families be campaigning for the photos to be released, so they could stop receiving death threats and harassment from people who think it never happened? Answer: No reason. It didn’t happen, and there are no photographs to show.

Did you know, Karen, that if you set out on a single-minded mission to prove once and for all that the Sandy Hook Massacre really did happen, you wouldn’t even have a starting point? All the records are sealed – the death certificates, police reports, everything outside of the media narrative. The school itself, of course, was quickly bulldozed. Why do you suppose they’d do all that? To protect the privacy of the families? Another first in the history of crime. And are these the same families who spent the months following the event plastering themselves all over national television talking about their dead children while begging for gun control? We’re protecting THEIR privacy by sweeping everything real about this event so far under the carpet that no broom on earth can ever drag it back out? Sorry, that’s horse hockey, plain and simple.

All you have, Karen, to support your theory that this actually happened is anecdotal evidence from the crisis actors themselves. Whereas I could (and have in fact in this very thread) present tons of solid evidence that it absolutely did not happen.